Insights by Opportunity Green

An Interview with Photographer Chris Jordan

Posted on 05. Nov, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

Chris Jordan’s photographic series, Running the Numbers is a powerful visual representation of the vastness of American consumption. He is a respected photographer who has exhibited his work internationally and speaks to audiences the world over about the powerful message behind his work. He says, “As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.” Chris spoke with me from his home in Seattle.

OG: Looking at your photographs, it seems like you evolved a system for representing the truth you wanted to show. At first the pictures in “Intolerable Beauty” show your journeys through recycling yards, new car lots, and loading docks, from the perspective of the camera lens. The viewer gets the sense that he or she is standing there with you, but may not get the whole feeling of what they’re really looking at. They may still be drawn to the aesthetic qualities and colors of the photograph. Later, in “Running the Numbers,” you use, I’m guessing, digital tools, to represent objects in the hundreds of thousands and millions. This way, people can look at and admire the quality of the design and the proportions and lines and colors and everything, but they are always brought back home to the message of the piece because every square inch of it is communicating a single visual message. Are you hoping to instill self-reflection in the consumer?

Chris: That’s exactly right. I have been passionate about photography for 25 years, and I didn’t start out as a photographer-activist. I did much more introspective work, and I still love some of that, but it was made on a personal level, not intended to convey a message to people. I initially started photographing giant piles of garbage, honestly because I was looking for these amazing, beautiful colors. I can’t really take credit for getting interested in consumerism. I had been photographing these really industrial areas, like the port of Seattle, and I would find massive amounts of crates and things, and they would look just beautiful in print. I took one photo, it was of an enormous pile of garbage, and I thought it was the best photo I’d ever taken. When people saw it in my studio they would say, “Wow, that’s a great statement about consumerism and over-consumption,” and at the time, I would get annoyed and actually argue with them, saying “That’s not what my work is about!” But then I got some advice from two well known and respected photographer friends, who convinced me that this was a path I could pursue.

So, you’re right about the evolution. I started learning more about the enormity and scale of the issue of consumerism, and realized that I wasn’t able to capture that scale with the straight photography I was doing. I started asking myself, “Where can I find the Mt. Everest of garbage?” And I realized there was no such place. Mass consumption is truly an invisible phenomenon that you can’t capture on film, because it’s happening in millions of locations all around the world in real time. Particularly here in the US, where we are the largest oil consumers on the planet.

OG: So your motivation to start digitalizing your images was to capture that massive scale?

Chris: Yes. I wanted people to be able to visualize and experience this data with their senses. It’s hard to process and make meaning out of something intangible, that you can’t see or feel.

OG: How do you come up with an idea for what you want to represent?

Chris: The idea for a new piece usually comes when I read a statistic. I’ll be reading the New York Times, and suddenly I see a number that just hits me like a sledge hammer. The most recent one was the number of cats and dogs euthanized in the United States every day. 10,000 is a big number. So when I read a figure like that, which may be peripheral to my worldview, something that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about, I know I need to do a piece.

OG: What’s your process once you’ve decided on something?

Chris: I try to come up with an iconic visual idea. I’ll look at the source of the statistic and see if that suggests anything to me. For the Dog and Cat Collars piece I thought of my experience visiting the Holocaust Museum, specifically the image of the pile of eye glasses. There’s also a pile of shoes. These images speak volumes about the inhumanity of the holocaust and they make you think about the people those glasses and shoes belonged to. So I thought of collars to represent cats and dogs. I also chose Snoopy as an image because it’s not scary or threatening. I want to seduce the viewer to come up close with their defenses down. I try to sneak up on the viewer with every piece. In “Intolerable Beauty” I use these beautiful painterly colors to draw people in, and then with “Running the Numbers” I tried to create the feeling of boring, innocuous modern art. I try not to raise people’s defenses.

OG: That’s a brilliant strategy. That way people are intrigued and then when they see what the piece represents it adds another interesting layer to the art, rather than making them feel screamed at for being bad people.

Chris: Yeah, you know, I’m sort of a therapy junkie. I’ve been going for almost 10 years and I’ve learned that the therapy process is a sophisticated way to get past ego defenses. If you ask therapists a question they’ll always bounce back with another question to get you to think about it. They’re skilled at dodging and weaving to get past defensiveness, which stops a lot of people from being able to change in the ways that they want to.

I don’t know if you know this about me, but I started out as a corporate lawyer. I was very lost. I came over from the dark side. I was raised with a sort of 1950′s approach to life, where you’re supposed to go to school and then go do something respectable, climb the ladder. I was supposed to achieve the American Dream. I was very seduced by offers of getting paid well, and I basically sold my soul and took a job I knew I wouldn’t like. I stayed 11 years, giving myself excuses like, “Some people don’t have jobs, or have to work at 7/11, you should feel lucky,” and “There are starving people in India,” and “Everyone has responsibilities, you can’t get out of yours.” I told myself to quit complaining, but at the same time I was dying inside.

I would see people doing these fabulous things, doing incredible things with their lives. Jazz musicians, I’m very into jazz, poets, documentary filmmakers… I felt that there was so much brilliance going on around me, but I wasn’t ever going to get to be a part of it. It was depressing, and made me very angry. Therapy helped me really look at that consciously, and I had this big realization. I realized that while I had always been afraid of failing as an artist, I was even more afraid of never never expressing my creativity and being miserable for the rest of my life. My fear of failing as an artist was like a wall that had kept me from pursuing my passion, but this new fear that I began connecting fear was like a giant boot easily kicking my ass over the wall. I quit the law firm. People told me it was a courageous thing to do, but they didn’t realize I was motivated by fear.

OG: Well, they say courage isn’t not being afraid, but rather feeling fear in the face of a challenge and doing it anyway. As a big fan of your photography, I’m so glad that you made the leap. So, tell me about your latest project.

Chris: I just got back from Midway island, where the Pacific Garbage Patch is. Most of the plastic there is within 5 feet of the surface, and we’re talking billions of miniscule pieces of plastic. They get broken down into smaller and smaller pieces over time until they are the size of molecules, and also the size of plankton, so they’re being ingested by filter feeders. It’s scary because nobody knows what the results of this are going to be right now. I photographed these baby albatross chicks that were dying because their stomachs are full of plastic. Their parents are going to look for fish and they come back with bottle caps, lighters, all kinds of plastic. It’s very sad, because there’s such tremendous over-consumption – you stick 6 of those little coffee stirrers in your Starbucks in the morning and then toss them without thinking twice, and without realizing that that plastic is literally never going to break down, unless it burns and gets released into the atmosphere as CO2. There’s also literally billions of tons of runoff from industry, and even the drugs that we take, after passing through our systems, are introduced into the ocean. Chemotherapy, aspirin, it all ends up in the ocean. I hope to spread awareness about this with this new set of photographs. I’ll also be speaking to middle school students in Tasmania after the Opportunity Green conference, which I love doing. I never have to explain my work to kids, they just get it instantly, and they’re so engaged and curious. It gives me hope for the future.

OG: Well thank you so much Chris for talking with me today. Your work is inspirational. I look forward to meeting you at the conference!

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Catherine Showalter: Introducing a Dynamic Sustainability Program at UCLA Extension

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

When you think of a “green metropolis,” perhaps cities like Portland, Curitiba, or Vancouver come to mind. Cities the world over utilize a wide range of strategies to promote environmental responsibility and awareness. London and Stockholm have their congestion charges, Barcelona has Bicing, Arlington, Virginia, the Twin Cities, and Denver, Colorado have been recognized by the EPA for their “smart growth” urban planning methods.  These kinds of innovative initiatives would never have come about had not creativity, experimentation, and collaboration been recognized as vital steps on the path toward a greener way of life. This is the kind of conversation that needs to be fostered.

Here too, in the City of Angels, a shift is occurring toward a greener way of being. Catherine Showalter, director of UCLA Extension‘s Public Policy Program, is contributing to this with the introduction of a new educational program that focuses on sustainability. “This is a total new model for us,” she says. Because academic settings are one of the primary places where ideas, experimentation, and discussion thrive, the new Certificate in Global Sustainability Showalter leads at UCLA Extension has the potential to make a huge impact, especially because many Angelenos are seeking to expand their knowledge and involvement with sustainability. In fact, students and professionals have shown such tremendous interest in the program that the course offerings this fall have been doubled. The result: LA is getting greener by the second. I discussed the details of this new program with Catherine last week. Read on to find out more.

Opportunity Green: What’s your background in terms of sustainability? Is it an idea that you grew up with, or did you come across it later on?

Catherine Showalter: Probably both, but my most related experience professionally would be my seven and a half years at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, as Director of Transportation Programs. There, what we were trying to do was to reduce the pollution from mobile-source emissions. So, that goes back some years, and I think all of us from the time we were little, got some message about making sure that we don’t waste. And then here of course, I’m the director of the Public Policy program and a lot of the activities and programs that we develop have to do with environmental issues as well as land use, planning, environmental law, transportation, it’s all related. This seems like it’s found its home at Extension, and I did express an interest in leading this effort and the Dean gave me that opportunity.

OG: How do you see the role of education in the development of sustainability?

CS: Oh, I think education has a leadership role. To identify not just what’s going on at the present time but to be on the cusp, to be in contact with those in the fields, and of course there are so many different disciplines when you talk about sustainability, but to have some sense of exactly what’s around the corner. So the way we developed this Sustainability Certificate was to make sure that it wasn’t stagnant, that it was truly dynamic. We know going in that all of the courses are not yet fully developed, there will be more and more areas of concentration offered over time as we identify the direction that we’re going with this field.

OG: What was the process for putting together this new program? How did it get decided what exactly was going to be included, and it is you need to know in order to be an expert in global sustainability?

CS: Well the way  it got started, it was a year ago now, June actually, that the Dean asked me to begin the process. So in August we got together a group, internally, of our program and department directors and talked about what it was that, just in general, we might want to do. We knew that LEED was out there, but we wanted to be much broader than LEED. We knew that we were not all experts in this area at all, and so we needed to tap into some expertise, professionally, in the different areas and so we put together a plan for moving forward. We also invited an advisory board, and we met with our advisory board twice. One to say, “Okay, this is what we think we want to do, what is that you see as the need?” We had done a little bit of market research prior to that first meeting, so we could share that with them. But we came out of it with the skeleton, the idea, the format of what this might look like. Then we used what they shared with us, as far what they thought needed to be included, and then met with the advisory board again and the discussion was, “This is what we heard, this is what we developed, are we on track?” and then developed it further. So what we ended up with was this program where there are three core courses, which are required, and these courses are each principles of sustainability.

The first course is the environmental dimension, it talks about the environment, the planet, and focuses on science. The second, Principles of Sustainability II, is the economic dimension, and the third core class is about the social dimension. It goes back to the planet, economics, and the people side of things, those are the three areas that we really knew we needed to address. So there’s those three required courses, and we also have as a requirement a one-day ethics class that everyone needs to take as part of the certificate program.

In addition, what we also include, because this is a 36-unit certificate, are areas of concentration that individuals may choose from. We identified four specific ones, and then one, a general studies, but the four areas that we identified with our advisory board to begin with were design, so you’re looking at some product or some thing from the beginning to the very end, the cradle-to-cradle idea. Business strategy is the second area of concentration, environmental law and policy is the third, and energy and technology is the fourth. And a fifth one has already been developed and will be ready to go for the spring of 2010, and that is education, it might be education and society. So that will be more geared those that are more interested in teaching or advocacy, something in that area.

So we have that, we launched it this fall. We have an outstanding response of interest already. For our first core class, we had to double up and add a second session because we were inundated with students that were registering, so we’re well under way with two great classes to talk about the Principles of Sustainability I. We’ll be offering the second core in the winter and repeating the first, and then in the spring we’ll be offering the third course. So the demand has just been outstanding, the interest is incredible. We’re very very pleased. And what we’ve tried really hard to do with this is to indeed have it be multi-disciplinary, so it cuts across all the different departments at Extension. In the past, certificates have been led by one department, it stays within that department, and it’s about a topic that only has to deal with one department’s issues. This is different. This is a total new model for us, in that it truly is representative of the different disciplines, and it takes a lot of coordination and colllaboration.

So where we’re going from here, as I said we launched it this fall, very successfully, and we’re learning as we move through it, but then we will be meeting again with our advisory board, probably in February to once again say, “Here we are, this is what’s been happening, and are we still on track or is there some change that we need to make,” to make sure that we are responding to how they envisioned it. But we’re very pleased.

The other piece that I didn’t mention is the collaboration with campus. UCLA, the campus, the different departments, we’ve been working with very closely. The Institute of the Environment is one department that has played a great role, not only do they serve on our advisory board, but they’ve been approving some of our instructors and the classes. The Environmental Law Center is another area of collaboration. The Urban Planning Department, and the Public Affairs Department, so we really have been collaborating across campus, and that’s made this workable as well. And of course, the Anderson School of Business. So I think that answers your question.

OG: Do you see any components of this kind of sustainable education that will one day become a required part of the normal liberal arts curriculum, something that you would have to take like writing skills?

CS: Interesting thought. Well, in a perfect world I would say yes. I can’t say whether that really will happen or not but, that’s a fantastic idea. Because it truly does permeate every area of our lives, not only our professional lives, but our personal lives as well, so, that sounds great! I don’t know that there are any thoughts of making that happen at this point in time, but we may get there. Of course the other thing that may happen is that there will be in time more degrees offered in this area, a Masters in Sustainability perhaps, at some point in time, we don’t currently offer this at UCLA, but again that seems like natural formation, a natural development.

OG: Absolutely. I just have a couple more questions. The first is about individual action versus broader collective action. So, in your opinion, do you think that one person can make a difference in reducing climate change and wastefulness by their actions, or do you think that it will ultimately take a broader policy change to really make an impact?

CS: It’s not either or. Each one of us has an individual responsibility to make that difference, and we all have our carbon footprint that we need to pay some attention to. And so, we need to take some responsibility and move to action, but we need to know what that is, and we know, if we do change our behaviors, how are we impacting the whole, what are the issues? And so, the education piece is crucial, on an individual basis. The education piece is also crucial on a broader scale. And so, we need our leaders to be proactive, whether they’re legislative leaders or corporate leaders, we need everyone to step up to the plate, whatever their role is, and really get behind the sustainability movement, and see it as a plus–for business, for consumers, for the environment. There’s no lose if we can really take some action on this. It is a lose if we don’t take some action on it. And I think we’re all at that point in time, but it’s not an either/or, it’s both.

OG: How long have you lived in Los Angeles, just as a precursor to my next question?

CS: I grew up in Southern California. In Los Angeles County, in Bellflower. So, a long time! This is my home.

OG: Ok, so this is my question. How would you picture a truly sustainable Los Angeles?

CS: Ooh. A truly sustainable Los Angeles would be one where we’re taking advantage of technology in that perhaps we wouldn’t need to be driving to work every day, we could find some remote way to work from other places so that the mobile-source pollution would be cut down. It would be one where we did have the personal responsbility that we passed on to our children, the message that really we need to care for the earth and so, there would just be a better respect–for whether it’s picking up trash, putting it in containers so it doesn’t go into sewage and ending up in the ocean and drinking water and killing the fish. So it’s technology, it’s personal involvement, and it’s making it a priority in our lives to appreciate the earth, and the fact that we depend on it.

OG: Are you looking forward Opportunity Green?

CS: We’re very involved with Opportunity Green, we’re looking forward to it, we welcome the opportunity to showcase the new certificate a little bit, but also of course, the Opportunity Green conference has attracted so many businesses that even listening to the presentations and networking with the corporate executives will be well worth the time and effort, not just for the certificate, but for the cause as a whole. So, Extension definitely supports Opportunity Green, we’re partners with the organizers, and we greatly look forward to it.

OG: Thank you. I really appreciate the time you took to talk to me today, and I look forward to meeting you at the conference!

CS: That would be great. Thank you.

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Redefining the Supply Chain: An Interview with Gaylon White, Part 1

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

Those who have worked side by side with this man have said the experience is better than any MBA you can get. He knows how to forge unusual yet productive partnerships, anticipate needs and developments, and create value for every player at the table. To me, the interesting thing about Gaylon White is that he understands the power of stories, not just the ones in words but those told in a visual language that “appeals to the sensualist side of every designer,” according to I.D. Magazine, and every consumer too for that matter. He started out as a sportswriter and then made his way into the corporate world, all the while developing his ability to distill a complex set of data points into something people can understand and relate to. Now he’s Director of Design Programs for Eastman Chemical Company, and has spearheaded a terrific series of collaborations with some of the premier design firms in the country.  These kinds of projects have resulted in a shortening of the gap between the very beginning of the supply chain and the very end, by connecting raw materials to the finalized products they will become. Read on to learn more.

OG: What’s it like being in Appalachia? Eastman is located in the Appalachian Mountains, right?

Gaylon: Yes, we’re in Tennessee, just north of Asheville, NC, and it’s a beautiful, verdant part of the country. It connects with an area where Eastman has an excellent record and tradition because we are in a very scenic part of the country and the plant is located right on the Holston River, so we’ve done a lot of things that are progressive in the area of environmental responsibility. The people who work here live here, and most of them are from here. We were established in 1920 as part of Kodak and spun off in 1994, so we were part of Kodak for 75 years and we’ve been independent for 15 years. There is this history of being very sensitive and mindful of the environment and trying to do the right thing, and I think our record of environmental responsibility is second to none in the chemical industry.

OG: It makes sense that having the natural environment around you inspires you to respect the earth more than being in a city.

Gaylon: Absolutely. We were one of only two chemical companies in Newsweek’s top 100 green rankings. If you look at the other top 100, they are not involved in an industry such as ours. It’s a steeper hill we need to climb, being a raw material supplier, but I think Eastman does a good job in that area. Because I’m not one who would work for just any company. My background in journalism, and I bring a broader perspective than just dealing with the manufacturing side of things.

OG: Actually, I’d love to hear about your background, and how you got to where you are today.

Gaylon: My degree is in journalism broadcasting, I started my career as a sportswriter for the Denver Post, the Arizona Republic, and then I also worked for a newspaper in Oklahoma City. Then I went into magazines, edited a city magazine in Kansas, and while doing that I did a story on Christmas cards celebrities send, and that landed me an interview at Hallmark. They offered me a job in PR, I had no idea what PR was, but I took that job, worked there for five years, and learned a lot. Then I went to Goodyear and worked in PR, and then got into speechwriting. I was the speech writer for the CEO at that time. Then I went to Control Data Corp and did speechwriting there, so I was involved in that for about 11 years, starting in ’84 at Goodyear, and then I joined Eastman in ‘92 as a speechwriter. So that background as a journalist and then in the corporate world as a speechwriter, what that’s done for me is help me distill the complexity you encounter in the business world and communicate it in a much more succinct fashion. It’s also helped me bring the storytelling perspective to Eastman as it pertains to design. When I think about my background, from sportswriting to now, the Eastman Innovation Lab website telling stories about designers, it really all comes down to storytelling, that’s the one common thread.

OG: Tell me about the Singapore project you did.

Gaylon: One of the things I wanted to do was work overseas, so they gave me the chance to establish a communications function for the Asia-Pacific region, and their headquarters were in Singapore. While I was creating that position, the opportunities I had in the region weren’t your traditional marketing, public relations, and communications, or market development. Rather, it was sort of a hybrid. So, I really used my communication skills to work with companies over there, in creating opportunities both for Eastman and for them. That led me to believe something similar could be done in the US. At that time, this was ’97-’99, when I was out in Singapore and working with companies throughout the region in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Australia, I looked around and saw that we needed to do something differently in the US to better understand the markets we were trying to play in. I saw of course what GE plastics was doing with designers at that time, they were very closely connected with the design community, they were doing road shows and other things with designers that educated them about their materials and also helped them in the product development process. At the time, around 1999-2000, Eastman wasn’t doing anything with design, in fact we had no understanding of what designers did or how we could benefit from what they do. So by learning about what GE Plastics was doing, I decided that there was an opportunity for us there, but we didn’t have as broad a portfolio of materials and we’re a much smaller company, so we’ve got to do thing differently. So I really started going to school with the educators, one of my first conversations was with the head of industrial design at Auburn University, and in turn he recommended that I contact the Industrial Designers Society of America, IDSA. I also contacted some polymer schools, Ferris State University, Ball State University, to understand how or what polymer schools were doing to work with design schools. They weren’t doing anything then, and they’re not doing anything now, which is a gap. But I quickly realized that this opportunity for us wasn’t all that different from what I had been doing in Asia, and that was using my communication and journalistic skills to identify stories and convince the people we were working with to work on developing those stories. The only difference is in Asia I wasn’t working with designers, here in the US I was.

OG: Nothing interests me more than when the fusion of old ideas and concepts results in something completely new and different, and that sounds like it describes just what you did, both in Asia and then at home. Can you describe how you were able to perceive this opportunity or need for something new?

Gaylon: It was relatively simple, really. If you sit in meetings with people chasing their tails trying to find new markets for their products, and identify new applications, and this is not for lack of intelligence, what we ultimately lacked was market insight that we get from our connection to the design community. That was really the light that came on in my mind: we’ve gotta establish a connection with these people who will give us insight we can’t otherwise access. I was reading stories in the press as well as looking at GE Plastics and saw that designers were gaining an influence. We’re a raw materials company, we make the pellets that then go to converters, that then extrude this plastic into products or packaging, and our fibers and materials are also in many cases ingredients that go into other things–we’re way back at the very beginning of the value chain. One of the key things we were missing, in many cases, was that we didn’t know where our products were going. We weren’t sure how they were being used. Designers of course are at the very end of the value chain, they’re working with brand owners, developing a final product or package, and they’re influencing if not specifying the materials that go into the product. So our very simple objective was, “How do we get our materials selected or at least considered at the front end rather than the back end?” Because traditionally what happens with materials is that they are the last thing to be considered seriously, after everything else. Often times products aren’t what they could be, because though they are in effect the DNA of the product or package, they’re not given the kind of front end consideration they need. And designers have come to recognize that too, so what’s happening now is that we’re getting calls from designers early in the process, so we can know help designers pick a material that will enables them in their design rather than dictating it.

OG: This process of doing collaborative projects with design firms and getting involved in the process early on, it really seems like a co-evolution, almost a natural process, that seems to make sense on a fundamental level. Why aren’t more companies aren’t doing this?

Gaylon: It’s a good question, and there’s no easy answer. Let me go back to the first couple design projects we did. One was a happy accident with Tom Dixon, a furniture designer in the UK, he’s well known for his work with Habitat. He wanted to create a line of furniture that he wound up calling Fresh, Fat Plastics. He wanted a material that could demonstrate how precious plastic is–there’s a lot of technology that goes into a plastic and he wanted to showcase that and turn it into a work of art, something that could be as cherished as a product made out of crystal. This line features Eastman’s copolyester material, and it really looks like glass. Tom is good at stretching boundaries and putting materials to extreme tests, almost destroying them in some cases, that’s in his own words what he likes to do. That was one project, and it did give us valuable insight. In particular, Tom was one of the first to notice that our cellulosic family of materials, these are plastics made out of wood pulp, had a great sustainability story. This was in 2002-2003 when sustainability was just beginning to emerge as a benefit for companies, but it wasn’t being articulated. He also helped us realize how valuable this material could be to designers.

Also in 2002, we did an eyewear project with IDEO, and there we saw how materials and design could advance each other. It was a good example of worlds colliding, because here we were, a somewhat conservative manufacturing company based in Appalachia, northeast Tennessee, and IDEO was working extensively in Silicon Valley, well known for their high-tech work–it was two entirely different worlds. So this project taught us how to communicate more effectively with designers, how to understand their thinking, and also gave us a great lesson about how our materials can affect the heart as well as the head. In turn, IDEO learned a lot about materials, I don’t think they had ever worked that closely with a materials company. So both sides learned. Ultimately these projects were instrumental in learning the importance of collaborating with the design community.

OG: Many thanks to Gaylon, and stay tuned for Part 2!

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An Interview with Peter Diamandis, Founder of X PRIZE: On Colonizing Space and Reinventing the Philanthropy Model

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

What do interstellar space, the human genome, ultra-efficient fuel, and the bottom of the ocean have in common? If you ask Peter Diamandis, these are all areas that urgently need a revolutionary breakthrough, paradigm shift, or new method of exploration. Major insights in any of these areas would constitute a huge social or environmental benefit, and Peter Diamandis believes these kinds of breakthroughs can be achieved fastest via large incentive prizes. Offer $10 million to anyone who comes up with a new way to get into orbit, and as evidenced by the results of Ansari X Prize in 2004, you will find yourself with some brand new sub-orbital technology. Aerospace designer Burt Rutan, together with financier Paul Allen of Microsoft, won the Prize with their craft SpaceShipOne.

The X PRIZE Foundation offers prizes in the $10M to $30M range for solutions to big challenges. Current prizes include the Google Lunar X Prize, Progressive Automotive X Prize, Archon Genomics X Prize, and proposed prizes in the areas of health care, energy and environment, life sciences, and education and global development.

I was thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to interview Dr. Diamandis last week. The founder and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, Zero G Corporation, Space Adventures, and several other companies, Dr. Diamandis is truly a visionary and an inspiration. Space is his lifelong passion, and he has taken enormous steps to open space exploration to the public. Today, Peter is filled with the wisdom and equanimity of a man who, propelled by the force of his passion, hard work and persistence, has overcome a thousand obstacles and achieved success in both the philanthropic and business communities. Seasoned by these experiences, yet still open to whatever new learning experiences the future may hold, Peter is full of energy, ideas, and optimism. It’s an incredible learning experience to hear his stories. Read on and see for yourself…

Opportunity Green: You talk about growing up in the 60′s and being inspired by the Apollo missions. What is it about outer space that fascinates you so much?

Peter Diamandis: I think it’s the potential that outer space has to benefit the planet, as well as the fact that we are a species of explorers. We have moved from the plains of Africa to Europe to the Americas, and we’re just at the very beginning of the evolution of the human race. The earth is sort of a nest, if you would, as the great Russian futurist Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky said, “The earth is a cradle,” for humanity. And we’re about to leave the cradle, during our lifetimes, not our children’s or their children’s, during our lifetimes the human race is going to irreversibly move beyond the bounds of Earth, and explore and discover amazing places and things.

OG: So you see it as part of our evolution. Have you been to outer space yourself?

PD: I have not been yet. I’ve enabled many and I’ve flown on our ZERO G airplane about 80 times, but I plan to as soon as I can. There is another very important reason that ties to what you’re writing about, which is, for the first time ever the human race has the technological capability to back up the biosphere, so to speak. The earth as a precious jewel has all the proverbial eggs in one basket. Should there ever be a disaster from an asteroid, terrorist activities whether biological or nuclear, there’s a lot to lose. We have the ability now as a species to literally sequence the biosphere, the genomes of the biosphere, and we have the collective digital knowledge of the human race resident on the net, and just like many life forms on earth are able to duplicate themselves within a process of budding, like an amoeba where it splits its cytoplasm and duplicates its DNA and then you have a backed-up copy, or like you back up the hard drive of your computer, we have the ability to back up the living planet. And I think it’s a moral obligation of the human race to back up Gaia.

OG: Well, that just opens up a whole new dimension to the possibilities of space travel! On your website, you have a lot of really great sayings: (1) “The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of u are going to the stars.” (2) “My Mission is: to open the space frontier for humanity;” and (3) “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” Clearly, you take these maxims very seriously–you’ve started nearly a dozen companies aimed at achieving your dreams. What did you learn from your failures along the way?

PD: So, I’ve learned the person who has the most to do with your failure is yourself and that many times you fail by giving up. Doing big things in the world is hard, and they take a long time, and they take a lot of passion and persistence, and I’ve learned that when I do something for purely monetary reasons and not because I’m passionate or committed to it, that [project is doomed] to failure. Because to really do something significant and big requires extraordinary commitment, and that extraordinary commitment requires tremendous passion. So it’s really most important for people to work on things they are passionate about, that they will do rain or shine, day in day out, whether they’re paid for it, because it’s what they’re put on this planet to do.

OG: I was intrigued by your talk at Stanford and your discussion of incentivizing truly risky stuff and how that gets done–how it used to get done in the past, with government investment, and how it gets done today. What things do you hope the X PRIZE Foundation will pursue in the future? It sounds like you’re looking to push the bounds of space travel further and further, and do you also see the Foundation pursuing things here on earth?

PD: I do. We are focused on the world’s grand challenges. What are the world’s biggest problems, where we’re stuck, and how can we incentivize brilliant people around the planet who might have very non-traditional solutions, to show them, demonstrate them, and bring them forward to the world. So, I think about the three or four areas that I feel sort of a moral obligation to create prizes in. They are: clean water, the availability of clean water on the planet is going to be an extraordinary crisis in the next few decades ahead, so some fundamental solutions are needed there. Number two, in the environment–the question of, “Could [there be] an X PRIZE in carbon extraction from the atmosphere?” The third is in education, trying to reinvent how we educate people, because we’re using a 100-200 year old model when things have dramatically changed. And then in areas of energy, in particular energy storage, where some breakthroughs there could be transformative. So those are areas outside of the space world that we’re focused on and think about. Another area that’s related to the green community is we’re looking at an ocean’s plastic prize. Can an X PRIZE help develop a new plastic packaging material that is fully biodegradable and in particular is biodegradable in ocean salinity, temperatures, and UV radiation.

OG: You also talked about fundraising during that talk, and I found your way of describing fundraising–you called it “a transfer of confidence,” between people–I found that to be really extraordinary, as a way of describing the exchange in value there. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

PD: Sure. At the end of the day, to do anything big and significant it takes three fundamental resources. It takes a certain amount of capital, and some of the things we are up to and others are up to, require hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. It requires access to incredible people, smart people, people who are connected, and then it requires access to new technology which either exists or has to be created. Getting access to capital really should be the easiest one, sometimes, many times, it’s not.

OG: That’s a good point!

PD: I think of capital and fundraising as energy transfer. You’re trying to get someone to transfer a certain amount of energy from their batteries, their bank account, to yours, for you to use in a very particular way. And ultimately for you to do that, you’ve got to get them to believe in you, that you’re going to be able to make great use of that in a highly leveraged and efficient fashion. And you also have to get them to believe that the objective you’re trying to reach is of great value, that they agree with. So it’s really about having them have confidence that the goal you’re going after is attainable and worthwhile, and confidence in you or your organization as a mechanism to achieve that. So in that sense it is a transference of confidence as well as a transference of energy.

OG: And do you see the transfer going both ways?

PD: To some degree, of course. When you’re accepting money from somebody, you’re aligning yourself with them. Money typically does not come with strings, it comes with relationships and partnerships. And you want to make sure that you’ve got great people involved in your circle or in your sphere, that will work with you.

OG: Speaking of confidence, I was also really intrigued by your idea of making announcements above the line of super credibility, which is intended to make the thing you’re announcement more likely to come true by a combination of the strength of the belief of others in what you’re doing, combined with “insane pressure” you’re putting on yourself by making a giant announcement in front of a bunch of people. Where does this idea come from and why do you think it works?

PD: Well, as far as I know it’s an idea I made up. As I watched why some announcements that seemed audacious were accepted, and others that also seemed audacious were immediately dismissed, it seemed kind of obvious to me that it was not only the audacity in the message but who was saying it, and the conditions under which they were saying it–where, how, who was listening–all of those things mattered. Humans have a psychological filter that immediately accepts something as fact, or deflects it as nonsense, and the message is really packaged by who is saying it and where it’s being said. And in that regard, there’s a line of super credibility–you make a judgment when you hear it. If you can make an announcement in a way that people believe it, you have a much higher probability of making it happen.

OG: Because of the power of their belief, or something else?

PD: Because of the power in which the message is conveyed. So there’s a line of credibility, and if you announce something below the line of credibility, in other words, you say something which is not credible for you to say, or in a place which is completely inappropriate, people discount it as silly or stupid. There’s a line of credibility above which if you announce something people might feel like, “Oh, this is interesting, and it might happen, this person might pull it off.” And then there’s a line of super credibility, where how it’s packaged, what is said, who says it, where they say it–the listener hears that in a way that, it’s a fact, it’s a done deal, because of how it’s said and who is saying it. Like, “Wow, if they’re saying it, it’s gotta be real and it’s gotta be coming right around the corner.” So that’s the line of super credibility, and that can be achieved many different ways.

OG: This sounds like a guide to your saying, “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself”!

PD: Yup. It’s something I believe in very much. I’ve given up on depending on other people to make the future I want to see happen, and to surround myself with people who believe with me, and are committed to going and making that future, and enabling it.

OG: The Ansari X PRIZE has, to a greater extent than could have been anticipated, revolutionized the entire concept and practice of space travel, but it’s still not quite as affordable as say skydiving or scuba diving or other adventures sought out by thrill-seekers. Do you hope that it will become more affordable in the future? Could you imagine, say outer space field trips for high school students?

PD: So today, one of my companies, Space Adventures, sends people into orbit privately. A trip is $40 million. Our next customer goes up in 5 days, Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil.

If you were to calculate the energy requirement to put you and your space suit into orbit, you can actually calculate the amount of energy, it’s easy to do, it’s a high school physics problem, it’s mass times gravity times height to get the potential energy of the altitude, and then one half mass times velocity squared to get kinetic energy. It’s about 1.6 gigajoules. If you were to buy that over the electric grid at 7 cents a kilowatt hour, and you had an electric winch that could winch you up into space very easily, and you spend the energy over the course of an hour, it turns out that the cost to get you and your space suit into orbit, if you can convert the energy 100% efficiently, is about $100. So the price improvement curve from the cost of going to space today, which is $40 million, to theoretically what it could be in the future, which is $100, is extraordinary. So that’s the future that I’m focused on creating.

OG: How do you reconcile the practice of using huge amounts of rocket fuel to launch space craft with the concept of sustainability, and do you try to find other ways to put green ideas into practice?

PD: So there are going to be more efficient ways to get up into space in the years ahead. The fact of the matter is that the rockets that launch right now, the mechanisms by which they launch the satellites that give us the ability to monitor and image the earth, and get all the space-based assets, so there is the total atmospheric damage from rockets–there are very few rockets that get launched into orbit every year, we’re talking about a few dozen–versus the benefits that the global telecommunications market and the global earth imaging market gives us in terms of environmental monitoring and global commerce. There will be ways in the future to make rocket flight far more environmentally friendly, and in fact those ways are the mechanisms that will also bring the price down. I can go into detail…

OG: Well, I didn’t mean the question to put you on the spot… Personally, I think that it’s worth it. I think that leaving 10 million computers on all over the world when they’re not in use, and wasting all that energy, is not worth it, and is just carelessness, but if that’s the same amount of energy that it takes to launch people into outer space and give them an experience that makes them feel they are reaching their full potential and feeding their spirit, then that’s worthwhile. But if there are ways in the future–I mean, you can compare rockets to cars in a way, it was a laughable idea that there would be millions of cars all over the world when they were first invented, but if X PRIZE Foundation has its way there will be a lot more rockets, hopefully quite soon. So if there are ways to make it more efficient, that would be great.

PD: There are ways we are looking at here at X PRIZE where the energy is electricity on the ground and it’s beamed to the rocket as it’s flying into space, and the working fluid on the rocket is simply water, where it’s basically turning the water into plasma and expending it out the back. So I mean, there are lots of much better ways to get into space. It’s just that the marketplace hasn’t been large enough to invest in making those changes.

OG: So, the method you just mentioned–the byproduct is just water.

PD: Yeah, and right now on the space shuttle main engine, when they burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen the byproduct is water. So there are definitely environmentally friendly ways to get into space. But, the space propulsion industry really needs some revolutions in the decades ahead and we’re working on it.

OG: How did you first become interested in sustainability and Opportunity Green?

PD: My interests have come from the fact that, number one, I think incentive prizes are able to help, and drive breakthroughs. I’m really focused on human innovation and breakthroughs in a way that I’ve gotten excited, I fundamentally believe that all problems are solvable and it’s just a matter of focusing the right people with the right incentives on those problems. Our near-term X PRIZE that is focused on sustainability is the Automotive X PRIZE, which is focused on bringing a brand new generation of cars to the marketplace, that are beautiful, affordable, safe, fast, and oh by the way, get over 100 miles per gallon. I want to create a new paradigm. At X PRIZE we’re all about changing paradigms. It used to be that you had to get government astronauts to fly into space. So the paradigm we’re trying to change in the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE, Gaia, is the one that says you have between efficiency and good looks, or speed and safety, and I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe you can have it all.

OG: I would definitely buy that car. Prizes are a great way to motivate people–they win the public’s imagination and provide the irreplaceable incentives of competition and prestige. Yet do you agree that there are a lot things in the world that need the attention of humanity’s most brilliant minds that may never coincide with the possibilities of prestige, profitability, or public recognition?

PD: Well, I think that the world’s largest problems, by definition, have the potential for great recognition or financial reward. The notion that, one of the concepts I’m excited about, is how do you elevate the bottom 2 billion people of the world’s population and inject them into the economy? What I mean by that is inject their minds, their ideas, their productive capabilities… I mean, that is huge. So, enabling those bottom billion or two to become consumers and thinkers and producers is, economically, a revolution. And there’s plenty of money to be made, and plenty of recognition, and plenty of humanitarian benefit. The flipside of the equation of course, is as you do that you’ve got to make sure that we can all live more sustainably and efficiently, because you’re putting yet greater drains on the atmosphere and other natural resources. I think efficiency is the focus of the next 10, 20, 30 years–how do we manufacture more efficiently, create energy more efficiently, grow food more efficiently. And I think we can get to the point where we do it efficiently enough where we can raise the standard of living for the population, and once we do that it slows the population growth curve as well.

OG: Practical restraints aside, what is the best thing you could imagine achieving?

PD: For me, wow… There are two things, one is helping to build and develop the first independent colony off the earth that backs up the human knowledge and biological database of this planet. That’s probably a life’s goal.

OG: Are you picturing this on Mars or the moon?

PD: No, I don’t picture it on a planet. I picture it in free space, I picture it as the ability to build very large free-flying colonies that are not inside the gravity well of a planet. There are plenty of materials out there, hundreds of millions of asteroids that are mineable and usable to construct such facilities, and such colonies. The other thing that I’m really looking forward to is to taking the concept of incentive prizes to the next level where they’re a mechanism for reinventing philanthropy, and driving the best of humanity to achieve breakthroughs where we need them most. So a point at which incentive prizes represent a significant minority share of philanthropy, 10-20% of philanthropic dollars are put in the form of prizes to reward people who create the breakthroughs.

OG: That sounds great. I want to go back in time just for a moment… I know that you were very inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s journey across the Atlantic and the idea of the prize money that inspired him to make that journey. I read that he and the St. Louis Spirit faced many challenges on their trip, including skimming over both storm clouds at 10,000 ft and wave tops at as low as 10 ft above the ocean, fighting ice, flying blind through fog for several hours and navigating only by the stars, when they happened to be visible. I see this as a journey of mythic proportions, and I’m wondering if you relate to Charles Lindbergh as a person.

PD: It was a journey of mythic proportions. I have never put my life in danger as much as he did, but I feel like I’ve taken on those journeys with the creation of X PRIZE or Zero G or Space Adventures, all of which were, I’ll jokingly say, an overnight success after 10 years of hard work. These were companies and organizations that in my heart of hearts I believed were important and achievable, but was met with 100 hardships along the way and literally needed to pick up and begin again. In that regard, that it’s never easy, I can relate to a difficult journey.

OG: That reminds me of a paradigm that is discussed by a group called the Mankind Project, and they have a whole series of things that they do…

PD: I was recently introduced to them by a friend of mine. Do you know anything about them?

OG: I do, I’m fairly familiar with them. There’s a lot of things that are for men only in that organization, and parts that are not open to the public or to women, but I know a lot about it because my dad has been a part of it for many years. So, the thing I was reminded of is their idea of the “old warrior” versus the “new warrior,” and the challenges each face that are so different, and that’s one of the things that we as a society have to adjust to in the modern era. The “old warrior” faces physical danger on a daily basis and has to be aggressive and competitive in order to garner resources for his family, and essentially in order to pass on his genetic material, and that what survival was about. But now we have the same kinds of hormonal, emotional, and sometimes physical responses when survival challenges arise, but it’s no longer about running away from tigers or competing with other men or other tribes for resources because we have them in abundance. That difference seems to parallel Charles Lindbergh’s journey and your journey today, both embody the path of the warrior but it’s a different world we live in today.

PD: That’s a great insight Gaia.

OG: So I think we’re out of time, but I just want to say, Peter, that I think what you’re doing is really incredible. Thank you so much for speaking with me today and I look forward to seeing you at Opportunity Green!

Post Script: A few days after this conversation, I had the chance to see astronaut Buzz Aldrin give a talk as part of a series of art exhibits and other events celebrating The World At Night. He mentioned that Russia and France are scoping one of the moons of Mars as a potential place for colonization, so I asked him if he would move to a Martian colony if given the chance.  His earnest answer was, “No, I like it here. And besides, I’m a very particular person, and I wouldn’t be able to get along with all those people for that amount of time!”

Would you want to be among the first to colonize another planetary landmass or free-floating space biosphere?

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Procter & Gamble: A Consumer Goods Giant Seizes Sustainability Opportunities

Posted on 06. Oct, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

Procter & Gamble, a multi-national giant, is the largest consumer goods company in the world (and was rated one of 2009′s most innovative companies by Businessweek). How did P&G make it to the top? A large part of the magic is in the company’s stellar ability to adapt to changing times. They started out as a candle and soap company in 1837 with the partnership of William Procter and James Gamble, but they certainly didn’t have the motto: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Instead of sticking to one formula that worked, the company evolved over time, and began providing people with things they didn’t know they needed. They introduced Ivory soap in the 1880′s, astounding their customers with the first bar of soap that floats. In the hundred years since they’ve come out with a number of game-changing staples like Crest, Pampers, and Tide, which are instantly recognizable to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock thanks to the great job P&G’s marketing team does. Today Procter & Gamble makes pretty much every product you can think of, not including furniture and electronics, that resides in the average American home.

Recently P&G has been winning a lot of awards and recognition for their efforts in sustainable practices, including the 2009 Presidential Award for Green Chemistry Challenge awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency. The winning product is called Sefose and will be used as a low-VOC lubricant in paint.

Grounded by old-fashioned values and propelled forward by a long history of excellent business decisions, P&G is now at the top of its game and turning its attention toward sustainability, conservation, and social responsibility on a global level. In my conversation with Len Sauers, Vice President of Global Sustainability at P&G, we discussed the history of sustainability within the company and where P&G sees itself in the future.

Opportunity Green: We at Opportunity Green want to take this opportunity to honor the shift that P&G has undertaken in terms of the culture around sustainability. I’ve done a lot of research and looked at the history and culture at P&G, and product innovation and social responsibility are two cornerstones that go back many, many decades. My first question has to do with the culture of sustainability itself. It’s an incredibly rich and complex concept, and introducing it into a system of pre-established corporate values (which in P&G’s case have been around for a long time) can present a challenge. I want to know, how did P&G build the culture, the skills and the competency necessary to achieve such a high level of recognition in the field of sustainability? Is this challenge different from other challenges that you’ve faced?

Len Sauers: Well, first off, thank you very much for those kind comments. We feel that we’ve tried to rise to the occasion in this area over the years. I think that it’s important to note is that sustainability is not really something that is new to P&G. I can trace back our work in sustainability for decades. It was probably in the mid-60s to mid-70′s that I think the company began to pay great attention to this area with the establishment of our environmental science department and all the work that we did in developing the methods for evaluating environmental safety and environmental toxicology. These were–even the methods that are used today, essentially were developed by P&G decades ago. So, I think we’ve had this long history of working in the area of, I would say, environmental sustainability, and also in the area of social sustainability with a lot of the company’s philanthropic programs. And I think over the years we had seen sustainability predominantly as a responsibility. As a large, multi-national company, it was our responsibility to be doing things that were right for the environment and doing things that were right socially. We have a comprehensive department that looks at environmental and human safety and then we have our philanthropic programs, which have been around for a long time. That culture of doing the right thing, of being responsible in this area, has been something that’s been part of P&G for a very, very long time. I think what happened more recently, with the great attention that has been placed on sustainability, is we saw that sustainability could be more than just a responsibility, it could also be an opportunity to build the business. There was a lot of call from the point of view of consumers on wanting to be more environmentally sustainable, there’s been a greater call from consumers on companies being more socially responsible, and we saw those as business opportunities. So we began evolve our program to include not only responsibility but opportunity. That’s how we, if think about the changes that have been made with time, I think it has been that focus on opportunity, and for us, that opportunity came in looking to improve the environmental footprint of our products, our operations, to try to deliver to consumer products that enabled them to be more environmentally sustainable in a meaningful way with the intent that it would help build the top line in addition to all this other work we were doing on the bottom line.

OG: Great! Before I go on, I want to ask you about the methods you mentioned that P&G developed in the 60′s and 70′s for measuring environmental impacts. Can you give us a couple specific examples?

LS: Well, there’s a number of things. Back in the 1960′s there was actually an issue that was occurring at the time where surfactants, which are the major that were used in laundry detergent at that time, were not fully biodegradable. So this is 50 years ago, and it created some issues with sudsing of the rivers. As these partially biodegradable materials would enter the rivers you would begin to see suds forming in some rivers. This is back in the 1950′s. P&G began to work to better understand how materials biodegraded in the environmental sector and how one could put materials into waterways or into various environmental compartments safely.

So we pioneered the development of all the methods that looked at biodegradability. One test for example, called the Sturm Test, was developed by Bob Sturm, who was an employee at Procter & Gamble at the time. And it is the method that is still used today to evaluate biodegradability. So having all that basic science understanding and developing all that for the industry in general, it was stuff that we freely shared, we were able to evaluate technologies in a better way, for ensurance of their environmental safety, it allowed us to change some of our ingredients that we were using to materials that were of better environmental quality and it allowed us even today as we look at new technologies to evaluate in a way that assures us that anything we use today will be safe for the environment and safe for people to use them.

OG: Wow, that’s great stuff. The second question I had is about the Sustainable Innovation Product, which P&G defines as reducing its environmental impact by 10% relative to its predecessor. I know that it’s very important to P&G that consumers need not make a choice between sustainability and performance and value. I’m wondering what kinds of technology and innovation is P&G exploring in order to meet both of these criteria. What percentage of P&G’s products are defined as sustainable now or in the next few years? When is that percentage of reduced environmental impact going to jump above 50%?

LS: Good series of questions, let me begin by saying that as we approached anything in sustainability, it is in our intent to provide a meaningful benefit. So whatever we do, it’s going to be meaningful. You’ve probably heard the debates around green-washing and things like that, so whatever we do, it’s going to be science-based, it’s going to be documented, and it will indeed provide a meaningful provide. Now if you think about green products that are on the market today in general, they’ve been around for a very long time. For decades you’ve seen these types of products on the marketplace. Yet very few consumers actually buy those products. Even though there’s been an increased attention to sustainability, the environment, climate, whatever, these products still represent a very minor share of the marketplace. So as we began to look at opportunity in sustainability, we wanted to make a meaningful benefit, and to us, having green products that would end up just being small shares that small niches of consumers would buy, would not be something that we’d want to do, because we’re not sure that that is meaningful. So we wanted to understand why these products ended up being up small niches and why consumers weren’t buying them, and this is where consumer research became very important, and what that research showed is that there is a very small number of consumers, a small percentage (5-10%) who are willing to accept a trade-off. When I say trade-off, I mean a decrease in performance or a higher price, in order to purchase and use a product that claims to be environmentally sustainable. We find that there is a vast mainstream, we call them middle-of-the-road consumers, amounting to 70-75% of the population. These are people are eco-aware, they want to do the right thing, but they are not willing to accept trade-offs in value or performance in order to purchase one of these products. And then we find there is another small group of people at the other end that just aren’t engaged at this time.

So for P&G, with our intent to make a meaningful difference, we wanted to target that mainstream consumer and not those small niche consumers. So we had to develop products which enabled consumers to be environmentally sustainable but for which there were no tradeoffs, and this is where this idea of Sustainable Innovation Products came from, which we define as products that have a reduced environmental footprint and we define that as 10%, but for which there are no trade-offs to the consumer.

So with that definition in mind, you now need to understand where you can make the most meaningful improvement in a product and this is where that chart comes into play. Let me explain to you, we use a tool called Life Cycle Analysis to help us understand where we can make the most meaningful improvement in a product’s environmental footprint. And the way Life Cycle Analysis works is you look at the environmental impact of a product across its entire life cycle, from the creation of the raw materials that are used in the product, to manufacturing, to logistics, to use in the home, to ultimately the disposal of the product. So you quantify that footprint, that impact, across a product’s total life cycle. and if you think about what environmental impacts there could be, it could be energy use, it could be greenhouse gas emissions, it could be solid waste generation, water use, etc.–all those individual environmental metrics. What we sent to you, is P&G’s energy footprint. So what did, is we looked at each of our major product lines, and you’ll see those on the side, laundry detergent, dish detergent, etc, and for each phase in the life cycle of those products, and that’s the other axis, you’ll see manufacturing, use in the home, transport, etc, we quantified the total energy that was used. And hopefully you’ll see there, it’s quite obvious, that across P&G’s total energy footprint, the driving metric, the one area where the most energy was used in the life cycle of all of our products, is use in the home of laundry detergent. You see that? So if we want to make a meaningful improvement in that environmental metric, we would develop–well let me take a step back for a second, you know what drives that number? What all that energy is used for? Is is the heating of water for laundry.

So if I want to make a meaningful improvement in that metric, in such a way that causes a meaningful benefit, so it’s products people will buy, I will develop a laundry detergent that enables consumers to wash their clothes in cold water, but they will see the same performance in cold that they would see in warm or hot, and they won’t pay more for the product. This is where our product Tide Coldwater and Ariel Cool Clean came from. With those data in hand, our R&D people went and developed new cleaning technologies that were focused on cold water washing that increased the performance of these products so consumers saw no trade-offs.

OG: Now I notice the second highest metric is in materials, and there has also been some work done to reduce the amount of materials and packaging that go into laundry detergents.

LS: Exactly. Packaging compaction. Now let me give you some numbers here that tell you the value of this approach that we take. By targeting that mainstream consumer, if I look at cold water washing for example, 3% of the household energy used in the United States today, is used to heat water for laundry. So if we can avoid that, if we can get everybody in the US who uses hot or warm water to now use cold, we would reduce household energy use by 3%, that equates to about 34 million tons of carbon dioxide that’s not released in the environment, which is about 8% of the US’s Kyoto target. As you know, the US did not sign onto the Kyoto target, but I can get 8% of this just from getting people to wash in cold water. So by creating a consumer product that targets mainstream consumers with a meaningful improvement and with no trade-offs, we can make what we believe are great impacts in environmental sustainability.

OG: That’s quite remarkable.

LS: Let’s go back to the compaction you had mentioned. An area on our grid there, which shows a place where we could target for a meaningful improvement, we compacted in the United States, all of our liquid laundry detergents. We compacted them by 50%. That one move, again delivering products which had no decrease in performance, just compacted, we removed about 140 million pounds of materials from the system, which now did not need to be created or transported. And again, huge environmental improvements because of that lack of transportation, huge environmental improvements because of the materials reduction. So that’s why I think, if you talk about, and you were so kind in the beginning to talk about, the success we’ve had. I think that success is based largely on our approach of making meaningful improvements targeted at mainstream consumers.

OG: Sounds like a good formula. I have a follow-up question. It seems like one of the major areas that needs work in order for a product like Tide Coldwater to succeed, is to change the perception of consumers that hot water makes cleaner laundry. Am I right? How do you plan to work with that, and change that perception? Because I feel like a lot of the battle in making sustainable products work is to change the perceptions consumers have of what they actually need.

LS: Yes. And what you find is that it’s the education of the consumer that is most important. We have programs in place to educate consumers on this. In Europe, where all of this went out first, we partnered with a number of NGO’s in the area, and it was the NGO’s, which were environment NGO’s, that were very instrumental in educating the consumers. The Energy Trust, for example, in the UK, had a very significant program in the UK on changing consumer behavior by telling them the value of cold water washing. When we first went into the UK about 2-3% of British consumers used cold water for laundry. We’re approaching 30% today. In the Netherlands, we were at about 5-6% when we started, over 50% of consumers now use cold water. So education by NGO’s is very important. Also, our advertising copy that we used in the area told people about financial savings that they could have by not using hot water. I can give you one statistic for the US, for example, if you look at our liquid Tide Coldwater the 100 oz bottle, if you in your home use hot or warm water and you switch to cold, for each 100 oz bottle you use, you save about $10 on your utility bill, because you’re not heating the water in your home. So the consumer sees a great value to washing in cold water, in addition to the environmental sustainability. Another thing we’re doing, in the United States, is we’ve been partnering with utilities, electrical utilities for example, and every now and then people will see a little flyer within their electric bill talking about the value of cold water washing and how they can save money.

OG: Now let me ask you again, is there a plan in place to reduce the percentage of environmental impact of your products above 10%?

LS: Well, we have set a goal as a corporation that between 2007 and 2012, we will develop and market at least $50 billion in cumulative sales of products like Tide Coldwater. So all across P&G’s businesses, our home care business, family care business, baby care business, etc., products like this have been and will continue to be developed, with the goal of developing $50 billion in sales total by 2012.

OG: But remaining at the 10% mark.

LS: The product will have at least a 10% improvement.

OG: Ok. I’m just wondering about the future. For the next 25 years, or 50 years, is a reduced environmental impact being explored, or not quite yet?

LS: You know, we’ll eventually begin to look more long term, but we are focusing right now on this $50 billion in products, which if you look at P&G’s total sales, we’re looking at about 12-15% of our total sales, will be products that have this reduction in their environmental footprint. So for an $80 billion company, that’s going to be a lot do to over the next couple years.

OG: Absolutely. That’s a huge shift. My next question is about the Global Sustainability department. I’m wondering how it interacts with other organizations. How big is the Global Sustainability department?

LS: Well, the actual corporate department is a relatively small group of people. The way that we set things up here at P&G is, we felt it best for the experts in individual areas of the business to be the ones that led sustainability for their specific business. So, we established what we call Single Points of Contact, or SPOCs, and we’ve established these SPOCs in each business unit, in each function, and in each region around the world. So there are about 20 to 25 of these individuals. They are senior level managers in their respective organizations, and within the corporate group, so within my group, we set the overall company’s principles and goals working with the executive management of the company, then we work with these senior level SPOCs in each of the businesses to operationalize this program. So here are the goals, this is where the company wants to be, how can you best operationalize these goals and principles within your business unit. So you can think, for example, our people in our fabric care division may approach things quite differently than our people in our health care division. Different priorities, different areas for opportunity. Individuals in marketing will look at this quite differently than individuals in manufacturing. So the idea was, to get the operationalization into the hands of the people of who are the experts in particular area. My group works largely across those individuals, helping them when they develop their programs, making sure they are consistent across the entire company with our principles and our goals, and then we become kind of that external face also for sustainability, doing like what I am doing today.

OG: I am curious about the Sustainability Ambassador Network, and I’m wondering how is that going, and are any of those ambassadors going to be joining us at Opportunity Green in November?

LS: Well, actually I’ll give you a few more minutes because this is one of the things we’re very proud of. We have a very focused program on our employees. If you think about all these things that I’ve talked about today, integrating sustainability in the rhythm of the business, having programs across all of our business sectors, goals around operations, goals around products, I mean, you can see probably for yourself that all the great ideas, all the great thinking and insight to make all this successful is going to come from our own people. They are going to be the ones that come up with the ideas. So we want to instill within them a passion for sustainability and a knowledge of sustainability.

OG: And the strong focus on employees has been around since the 1880′s, right?

LS: Oh, we’ve always had a great focus on employees, but now we’re stepping up the focus on education and sustainability. So we are educating our employees on the importance of sustainability, the company’s goals, and we also want them to live a sustainable lifestyle within the workplace. So, we encourage recycling, we encourage energy reduction within the workplace. All those kinds of things to engage the employees with sustainability, so they’re thinking sustainability in the workplace and we hope then that that thinking gets translated into their jobs where they are now looking with a sustainability lens as they develop and produce products. We have a number of employees, we’re probably approaching 500 employees now, that really have a very very strong interest in sustainability, to where they want to be very vocal advocates of sustainability within their organization and within their site. This is our SAMBA network, our sustainability ambassadors. It’s a very selective group of people, they are volunteers to a great extent, they have a great passion for sustainability, and they are really the key in operationalizing this as we go forward. Unfortunately, none of them will be attending the conference, I’ll be coming by myself, but they are a very critical part of our program.

OG: Thanks so much for speaking with us at Opportunity Green today, it’s been a pleasure and we can’t wait to meet you in person!

LS: Thank you.

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A Pragmatist’s Approach to Sustainability: An Interview with Gensler’s Nellie Reid

Posted on 20. Aug, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.

It’s easy to be drawn to the flashiness of radically innovative design: imagine the possibilities of a futuristic community where every building is entirely self-sufficient and biologically integrated into the natural landscape. What could transportation look like? Spider web zip lines? Solar powered hovercrafts? The possibilities are endless. But here and now, the progress of sustainable design in “mainstream” architecture often comes down to making small incremental changes, both in terms of building practices and in the building codes that determine what is legal, safe, and economically feasible. Nellie Reid, Sustainability Leader for the southwest region at the architecture firm Gensler–a sponsor of the Opportunity Green conference–is quick to remind us that even though we may not be making gargantuan strides at lightning speed, there are many simple changes we can make right now that are not necessarily all that radical, yet still have far-reaching impacts. In other words, good green architectural design is often about implementing that elusive specimen in modern building and urban planning practices: common sense. And it’s not all up to legislators and architects. In Nellie’s words, “political, corporate, community, and individual will are essential to changing the industry.” My conversation with Nellie follows after the jump.

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